Marc MacSharry (Sligo-Leitrim, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Given that we are all on the one team, perhaps we could conspire together to come up with a view on whether there is recourse, whether it is the HSE, the State Claims Agency, CervicalCheck, all of the above or whoever. If the witness could give us a note on it between now and the next meeting, that would be fantastic.

At the meeting the other day, we were talking about the Legal Services Regulation Act 2015 and we also discussed the Civil Liability (Amendment) Act 2017. It is clear from recent days that parts of those Acts have not been commenced, which has affected the State Claims Agency's ability to do its work as Mr. Breen expressed at the meeting of the finance committee the other day. I will quote Mr. Breen. He said:

I personally sat on the medical negligence working group in 2010. We advocated PPOs, periodic payment orders, legislation. We advocated pre-action protocol. If we had the pre-action protocol tomorrow, I know that myself and my colleague [Jenny, who was with Mr. Breen at the time] would say it would transform the behaviour and way we would handle these cases. It has been in the UK for a very long time and what it does is it stops the adversarial element. People do not have to issue proceedings, simply a letter of claim. We then issue a letter in response to that and the idea is that you narrow down the issues to the issues that are real between you and that you mediate them.

I can tell the Chairman that I have advocated this position for a very long time. Despite the fact the Legal Services Regulation Act has brought that into place, subject to the making of the regulations, we do not have it even now. It would be of considerable assistance to us if we had it tomorrow. We still do not have it because that section of the Act has not been commenced or implemented. Is that correct?